The tissue that has never stopped

Omnis cellula e cellula — every cell from a cell. It is the least poetic sentence in nineteenth-century biology and it has an extraordinary consequence when you follow it backward.

Cell division has not stopped once anywhere in your maternal ancestry. Not at any birth, not at any death — the deaths happen to the branches, never to the line. The material you are made of has been alive, continuously, without a single interruption, back through every mother in the chain and out the far end of the species. Nothing in the tree is ever created and nothing ever begins. Things only branch, and things only stop. The tradition keeps a small hard image of the same intuition in the luz bone — the indestructible seed from which the body is said to be rebuilt. Biology's version is less romantic and considerably stranger: the seed was never destroyed because it was never separate.